505 research outputs found
Information Spreading in Stationary Markovian Evolving Graphs
Markovian evolving graphs are dynamic-graph models where the links among a
fixed set of nodes change during time according to an arbitrary Markovian rule.
They are extremely general and they can well describe important dynamic-network
scenarios.
We study the speed of information spreading in the "stationary phase" by
analyzing the completion time of the "flooding mechanism". We prove a general
theorem that establishes an upper bound on flooding time in any stationary
Markovian evolving graph in terms of its node-expansion properties.
We apply our theorem in two natural and relevant cases of such dynamic
graphs. "Geometric Markovian evolving graphs" where the Markovian behaviour is
yielded by "n" mobile radio stations, with fixed transmission radius, that
perform independent random walks over a square region of the plane.
"Edge-Markovian evolving graphs" where the probability of existence of any edge
at time "t" depends on the existence (or not) of the same edge at time "t-1".
In both cases, the obtained upper bounds hold "with high probability" and
they are nearly tight. In fact, they turn out to be tight for a large range of
the values of the input parameters. As for geometric Markovian evolving graphs,
our result represents the first analytical upper bound for flooding time on a
class of concrete mobile networks.Comment: 16 page
Rational Fair Consensus in the GOSSIP Model
The \emph{rational fair consensus problem} can be informally defined as
follows. Consider a network of (selfish) \emph{rational agents}, each of
them initially supporting a \emph{color} chosen from a finite set .
The goal is to design a protocol that leads the network to a stable
monochromatic configuration (i.e. a consensus) such that the probability that
the winning color is is equal to the fraction of the agents that initially
support , for any . Furthermore, this fairness property must
be guaranteed (with high probability) even in presence of any fixed
\emph{coalition} of rational agents that may deviate from the protocol in order
to increase the winning probability of their supported colors. A protocol
having this property, in presence of coalitions of size at most , is said to
be a \emph{whp\,--strong equilibrium}. We investigate, for the first time,
the rational fair consensus problem in the GOSSIP communication model where, at
every round, every agent can actively contact at most one neighbor via a
\emph{pushpull} operation. We provide a randomized GOSSIP protocol that,
starting from any initial color configuration of the complete graph, achieves
rational fair consensus within rounds using messages of
size, w.h.p. More in details, we prove that our protocol is a
whp\,--strong equilibrium for any and, moreover, it
tolerates worst-case permanent faults provided that the number of non-faulty
agents is . As far as we know, our protocol is the first solution
which avoids any all-to-all communication, thus resulting in message
complexity.Comment: Accepted at IPDPS'1
Stabilizing Consensus with Many Opinions
We consider the following distributed consensus problem: Each node in a
complete communication network of size initially holds an \emph{opinion},
which is chosen arbitrarily from a finite set . The system must
converge toward a consensus state in which all, or almost all nodes, hold the
same opinion. Moreover, this opinion should be \emph{valid}, i.e., it should be
one among those initially present in the system. This condition should be met
even in the presence of an adaptive, malicious adversary who can modify the
opinions of a bounded number of nodes in every round.
We consider the \emph{3-majority dynamics}: At every round, every node pulls
the opinion from three random neighbors and sets his new opinion to the
majority one (ties are broken arbitrarily). Let be the number of valid
opinions. We show that, if , where is a
suitable positive constant, the 3-majority dynamics converges in time
polynomial in and with high probability even in the presence of an
adversary who can affect up to nodes at each round.
Previously, the convergence of the 3-majority protocol was known for
only, with an argument that is robust to adversarial errors. On
the other hand, no anonymous, uniform-gossip protocol that is robust to
adversarial errors was known for
Self-Stabilizing Repeated Balls-into-Bins
We study the following synchronous process that we call "repeated
balls-into-bins". The process is started by assigning balls to bins in
an arbitrary way. In every subsequent round, from each non-empty bin one ball
is chosen according to some fixed strategy (random, FIFO, etc), and re-assigned
to one of the bins uniformly at random.
We define a configuration "legitimate" if its maximum load is
. We prove that, starting from any configuration, the
process will converge to a legitimate configuration in linear time and then it
will only take on legitimate configurations over a period of length bounded by
any polynomial in , with high probability (w.h.p.). This implies that the
process is self-stabilizing and that every ball traverses all bins in
rounds, w.h.p
Simple Dynamics for Plurality Consensus
We study a \emph{Plurality-Consensus} process in which each of anonymous
agents of a communication network initially supports an opinion (a color chosen
from a finite set ). Then, in every (synchronous) round, each agent can
revise his color according to the opinions currently held by a random sample of
his neighbors. It is assumed that the initial color configuration exhibits a
sufficiently large \emph{bias} towards a fixed plurality color, that is,
the number of nodes supporting the plurality color exceeds the number of nodes
supporting any other color by additional nodes. The goal is having the
process to converge to the \emph{stable} configuration in which all nodes
support the initial plurality. We consider a basic model in which the network
is a clique and the update rule (called here the \emph{3-majority dynamics}) of
the process is the following: each agent looks at the colors of three random
neighbors and then applies the majority rule (breaking ties uniformly).
We prove that the process converges in time with high probability, provided that .
We then prove that our upper bound above is tight as long as . This fact implies an exponential time-gap between the
plurality-consensus process and the \emph{median} process studied by Doerr et
al. in [ACM SPAA'11].
A natural question is whether looking at more (than three) random neighbors
can significantly speed up the process. We provide a negative answer to this
question: In particular, we show that samples of polylogarithmic size can speed
up the process by a polylogarithmic factor only.Comment: Preprint of journal versio
Prevalence and risk factors for thermotolerant species of Campylobacter in poultry meat at retail in Europe
Abstract The thermotolerant species Campylobacter jejuni, Campylobacter coli, Campylobacter lari and Campylobacter upsaliensis are the causative agents of the human illness called campylobacteriosis. This infection represents a threat for the health of consumers in Europe. It is well known that poultry meat is an important food vehicle of Campylobacter infection. As emerged from the reported scientific literature published between 2006 and 2016, poultry meat sold at retail level in Europe represents an important source of the pathogen. The contamination level of poultry meat sold at retail can vary depending on pre- and post-harvest factors. Among the pre-harvest measures, strict biosecurity practices must be guaranteed; moreover, among post-harvest control measures scalding, chilling and removal of faecal residues can reduce the contamination level of Campylobacter. An additional issue is represented by increasing proportion of Campylobacter isolates resistant to tetracyclines, ciprofloxacin, and nalidixic acid, thus feeding a serious concern on the effectiveness of antibiotic treatment for human campylobacteriosis in a near future
Effect of temperature and relative humidity on algae biofouling on different fired brick surfaces
Abstract The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of environmental temperature and relative humidity on algae biofouling that often occurs on porous and rough fired brick surfaces. Brick samples were chosen since their common use on building facades. Accelerated growth tests were performed under different relative humidities and different temperatures. Results showed the effects of different temperature conditions in terms of algae growth delay and reduction of the covered area. All the relative humidity conditions tested substantially showed no growth from an engineering standpoint. The modified Avrami's law succeeded in modelling the biofouling under the different environmental conditions
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